


Love At A Glance

by raendown



Series: MadaTobi Week 2019 [4]
Category: Naruto
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 21:29:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20142265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raendown/pseuds/raendown
Summary: Madara helps Tobirama try something new and the results aren't at all what either of them expected.





	Love At A Glance

**Author's Note:**

> MadaTobi Week Day 2 Prompt: Blind Tobirama
> 
> Had an idea pop in to my head and I thought why not add to the week!

“Are you ready?”

“Is it possible for one to ready oneself for such an experience?”

He could feel Madara glaring at him just as the man always did and it added a flavor of normalcy that immediately calmed him, loosening the muscles he hadn’t realized were tensed in his shoulders. Surprisingly gentle hands brushed under the sides of his jaw and traced the edges of his tattoos where they disappeared under his collar.

“Don’t be snarky,” Madara scolded him. “I’m being very nice to you right now.”

“Noted. I suppose I shall be appropriately grateful afterwards – if you make a good showing of yourself.”

“Are you disparaging my skills?”

Tobirama snorted. “Let me experience them first; I’ll disparage them afterwards.”

He grinned at the sound of teeth grinding together in frustration. Even after several years together there was no better fun to be had than winding his husband up and listening to the many varied expressions of irritation. Madara was far and away the most expressive person he’d ever met other than his own brother. It was the freedom of those emotions that drew Tobirama to him initially, the way his outside perfectly reflected his inside where chakra always told the truth.

Most people thought it must be easy to lie to a blind man. Those people always seemed to forget Tobirama’s deep connection to the chakra networks running through every living thing, the way he could listen as no one else could because he didn’t have whole other source of input to confuse his idea of the truth. He loved his partner first for never trying to conceal his own emotions and second for the sheer beauty of how well he resonated with his own chakra. Lies will wear on a person, Tobirama had found, and after years and decades of lying as all shinobi do he found there were very few who maintained harmony with their own chakra as time marched on.

His husband would be a powerful man long after everyone else’s chakra began failing them, a symptom widely attributed to old age.

“Are you paying attention to me?” Madara demanded.

“No,” he admitted blandly. “I’m distracting myself with disgustingly sappy thoughts and a little bit of chakra theory.”

“Of course you are. Well stop. I need you to hear me.”

“Yes dear.”

Madara huffed but his fingers remained gentle in their hold. “It’s important that you don’t move because a single shift in the wrong direction could break the flow and I want the transition in and out to be as seamless as possible. What I’m giving you is no more than a memory so you won’t be able to interact or change anything. There will be movement but if you focus in the center–”

“You,” Tobirama interrupted him.

“Indeed, me. I will be in the center.”

Nodding slowly, Tobirama took a deep breath. “Anything else?”

“I think we’ve covered everything else a hundred times but if you _forget_ everything else just remember that I can still hear you and I can stop anytime you want me to.”

“Okay.” The fingers cupping his jaw stroked him one more time and he smiled warmly.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

It felt like an invasion, albeit a gentle and welcome one. By the descriptions he’d heard from many people he thought it might be compared to the sensation of having a genjutsu cast when you know it’s coming. Madara’s chakra poured out from where he knew the man’s eyes were, the Mangekyo Sharingan formation spinning wildly, and Tobirama experienced it only through his internal senses as waves of his husband’s presence sank in to his own ocular nerves and then-

And then.

He was going to be seasick. Tobirama squeezed his eyes shut tight but it made no difference, as Madara had promised it wouldn’t, for the vision around him did not stop moving. Nothing made sense. The world was a mix and all too much and he wasn’t sure whether the movement was the problem but he wanted it to stop.

More than that, though, he wanted it never to end. He understood so little but Tobirama forced his poor confused mind to focus and to memorize in a way he’d never had to before, as many details as possible filed away to keep as precious treasures from this day forward. This was a gift he could never possibly repay. Surely nothing he could ever dream of would mean as much as what Madara had offered so freely, an offhand idea over dinner one night now made glorious and terrible reality.

They had agreed beforehand on something short but a handful of seconds felt like forever in both the best and worst ways before finally Madara's voice whispered soothingly that it was all going away. Relief swept through him when the vision faded and his world returned to the same darkness he had lived in for more than thirty years, something bittersweet clinging to the edges of him as he fought to recall the details he didn’t even understand. Fingers combed through his hair and touched his face and he realized he was crying.

“Are you alright?” Madara asked. He nodded. “What was it like?”

“Terrifying,” he admitted.

Not the answer his partner was expecting, judging by the startled hum. “It wasn’t anything bad.”

“I didn’t understand it. My mind didn’t…doesn’t know how to process any of that. You know I was born blind so I’ve never seen color and I’ve never seen movement and I know–” Tobirama stopped the flow of words when he realized it wasn’t only his words that had begun to shake. His body was trembling like a leaf.

“Come here.” Madara gathered him close and continued to comb through his hair, waiting patiently until he was able to continue speaking.

“I know that it was you but I don’t…know…what that means. The shapes meant nothing because I’ve never seen a human with my eyes before. And it’s so bright! How do you concentrate when the world is so bright? With so many colors!” Tobirama forced himself to draw another breath. “Is that color? How many colors were there? W-what ones? Your hair…is…black?” He thought he could remember someone mentioning that once, something not many people would describe out loud when most could tell with a single glance.

A rustle and a brief kiss were his answer. “Yes, my hair is black. Can you guess what you were seeing or would you like me to tell you? I gave you a few hints when I decided on the memory but…”

“No, I wanted to guess. There was a lot of the same color I think. And it was moving. Another color through it? And I know that was you in the center so all of that color was…hair. Your hair. Were you brushing your hair?”

“Yes.” Only one word but it sounded like a floodgate. Madara's chakra wavered and suddenly Tobirama was aware that he wasn’t the only one overwhelmed with emotion.

Unsure of what else to say, he said the truth. “You’re beautiful.”

“How can you say that when you just said you didn’t even really understand? You don’t have any comparisons!”

“I don’t need to understand.” And coming from him that was saying a lot. Tobirama reached up to brush at the hair he had just seen for the first time, the beloved face he’d never known until today. “It was you. That’s all I need. I don’t…I don’t think I want to do this again. If the only thing these eyes ever see is your face then I’m fine with that. Vision is a little terrifying when I’ve gone so long without it. It’s just not a part of my world.”

“Well there’s no need to be so sappy about it,” Madara grumbled and he gave a shaky laugh.

Out of all the many possible outcomes to having his husband’s unique Mangekyo pattern grant him a brief moment of sight in the form of a shared memory, he never would have expected to find himself so viscerally terrified. Now that he was taking a few moments to calm down he thought it was probably an instinctive reaction to his brain being inundated with so much information that it simply wasn’t trained or even equipped to process. He’d meant what he said, he didn’t think he would ever want to repeat this, but he was glad that they’d done it. Knowing Madara's face was an experience he could never regret.

And more than that it was something that would have stayed in the back of his mind for the rest of his days, a small niggling wonder forever pulling at his curiosity. What was it like to see? From the moment Madara mentioned that he thought his own Mangekyo could help Tobirama experience what the rest of the world lived with every day he was helpless to do anything but accept that gilded offer lest his own imagination spiral out of control.

“Thank you,” he said after a few minutes of simply holding each other. 

“Don’t thank me for scaring you,” Madara grunted.

“Would you prefer I be angry?”

“It would feel a bit more normal,” His husband admitted.

Tobirama couldn’t stop himself from chuckling. “Ah, right then. How dare you be the most important part of my life and make every day together a gift? I demand recompense.”

Listening to Madara splutter indignantly and shout at him for ‘doing anger wrong’ Tobirama breathed out the last of the tension in his body. In his mind he brought up the confusing image that had been granted to him for such a brief time and tried his best to recall the details. Not much about it made sense to him even if he did know intellectually which parts corresponded with his knowledge of human anatomy. He still tried his best because that was his husband. For the first time in his life he had a face for the name, so to speak, and Madara's face was the only one he had ever seen. Would ever see. That was special in ways he couldn’t hope to put in to words.

Doing his best to hold that image in his mind as he lifted his face more towards his partner’s, Tobirama decided that the room was indeed getting a little too sappy and, of course, the best way to break the tension would always be to get Madara riled up again. He’d known the man long enough to know how to do it with two simple sentences.

“I’m glad you didn’t insist on showing me my own face. I’d have gone doubly blind, I’m sure.”

Madara's enraged shrieking that he was _beautiful_ and _perfect_ and not allowed to saying anything against that was music to his ears. As long as he had his hearing and his sensing, able to feel the sincerity of his husband’s emotions, Tobirama was just fine with his lot in life. 


End file.
